


The Difference in Wanting and Needing to Know

by deervelvet



Category: Gundam 00
Genre: Gen, Mentions of War, and the kinds of things that come with it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-30
Updated: 2019-01-30
Packaged: 2019-10-19 06:47:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17596448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deervelvet/pseuds/deervelvet
Summary: She wishes she could trust Veda to provide her a complete report with everything she needs to effectively perform her role as leader, but she can only be assured that it has provided her with everything it thinks she needs to know. And there’s a big difference, Sumeragi thinks, between what Veda thinks she needs to know and what she actually needs to know. [One-shot, just ever so slightly pre-canon.]





	The Difference in Wanting and Needing to Know

Sumeragi draws her knees up to her chest, tucks her face into them. Fetal, an infant in her great, mechanical mother’s womb. It’s too silent for sleep. Every groan of the hull is the ship breaking apart and being sucked into a black hole. It’s too silent to stay awake, too. Every woosh of a life support system is the last of their oxygen escaping through some undetected gash in the ship’s side. It’s too silent. Every unidentified noise is their imminent destruction.

 

It’s too silent.

 

It’s one forty seven Greenwich Mean Time, and it’s quiet on the Ptolemaios, more quiet than it’s been since they deployed some twelve nights ago. No one has roused to check the consoles they now trust will run unaided through the night. No one has been struck with the urge to raid the rations — technically a violation of regulations aboard Ptolemaios, but they’ve brought more than enough food for this first deployment; better safe than sorry. There’s no one in the hangar running protocols in the machines with which they’ve been training in preparation for their first real sortie. Their first real exchange of fire. Their first real instance of bloodshed. That date is fast approaching.

 

But tonight, it’s all quiet in the Ptolemaios and far too loud inside the mind of Sumeragi Lee Noriega.

 

She uncurls her muscles, feeling her abdomen remembering how to relax and appreciating that the tendons in her feet finally unclamp themselves. She’s drifting prone - or maybe she’s on her back. In space, there’s no orientation. Such manmade constructs are of no significance in an environment that seeks only to snuff out all life as humanity defines it, the still unknowable particles and wavelengths that weave themselves together to form the fabric of what they call Outer Space straining out all intrusion like a fine mesh sieve to the desired outcome of absolute zero. Space itself is death, and that’s the problem: the silence on board the Ptolemaios tonight has given Sumeragi an opportunity too ample to think about death to pass up. She doesn’t want to think about death, and yet she finds herself staring blankly at a floor panel — ah, yes, she’s definitely floating prone by Earth standards — and following her mind down a trail that is lined with billboards that display her memories in brilliant detail. She sees the faces of people she once called her countrymen, her comrades, friends, her lover. She remembers that they’re gone and her body reflexively recoils into a tight little knot of flexed, rigid muscle again. They’re gone because of her, because of orders she gave them — orders they should have been able to trust, that they did trust.

 

“It’s fine,” she actually says out loud to herself. She wants to hear how it sounds coming out of her mouth. It sounds like smoldering embers and the sound of a sixth shot of vodka and the way a voice carries down a deserted hallway. It sounds like a lie. She breathes in through her nose and huffs out through her mouth. “They’re fine,” she tries again, more forcefully this time. She’s almost able to convince herself that she believes it this time.

 

The other problem — or perhaps it’s really an iteration of the same problem — is that it’s not only memories that Sumeragi battles in the silence, but her imagination of things that could be. She worries that her crew are silent because they’ve been snuffed out as they slept. Suffocation from a carbon monoxide leak, a massive aneurysm, a slow-acting poison laced in the drinking water supply that has only avoided killing Sumeragi herself because of her preference for fermented drinks over the flat sobriety of water. There are a million ways it could have happened, and it’s hard to shake the imagined scenes of their cyanotic skin shedding the last of its warmth into the cold interior of the ship. What a way to go.

 

She needs to check on her crew. The urge is sudden, and it is overwhelming.

 

At twenty five, she’s only just reached the point of maturity that the adolescents from which she’s just recently felt correct in distinguishing herself have begun to look young, and anyone younger than eighteen downright infantile. It’s hard to guess based on appearance alone, but she thinks the oldest of the pilots is Lockon, and she thinks he may be around her age. He’s grown into his face as far as she can tell, but he’s young like her. Aside from what she thinks may be scars, he’s got the unmarred skin of a new adult and the occasional fit of over-enthusiasm to match. Tieria remains a mystery to her. From some angles, he’s an adult. From others, just a boy. She thinks he must be in his twenties — but maybe not. Maybe he’s a particularly mature teenager. The sort she’d wished to be; even as a genius graduating at the naïve age of seventeen, she’d wanted the older students to treat her like an adult and found the girlish roundness of her face quite contrary to her goals.

 

The other two pilots are teenagers and quite obviously so. Everything about their existence screams of pubescence: lanky limbs and hands and feet that just aren’t quite the right proportions, eyes that sit too large on their faces, skin that’s dewy with hormone-rich oil by evening, uneven voices and a general scent of teenage boy that fills the confines of the ship. Allelujah’s muscular, but in the way that the kids on the junior football league in Sumeragi’s hometown are muscular — like it’s a costume made of foam. (But she knows it’s not; she’s seen him put them to use.) Setsuna looks as though he could have been that built if he’d been properly nourished as a child, but as it stands, there’s something disproportionately bobbleheaded about the fluffy mass of black hair that sits atop his angular face and skinny body. He’s fit, no doubt, but in the way that master mixed martial artists are fit — wiry as a piece of overcooked brisket.

 

Sumeragi finds herself pulling her body along the wall-mounted handholds in her bunk, reaching for the conveyor handle that will pull her effortlessly through the ship’s corridors.

 

She doesn’t know exactly how old any of the Meisters are, because Veda has not decided their ages a pertinent piece of information for her to know. This is not uncommon. She wishes she could trust Veda to provide her a complete report with everything she needs to effectively perform her role as leader, but she can only be assured that it has provided her with everything it thinks she needs to know. And there’s a big difference, Sumeragi thinks, between what Veda _thinks_ she needs to know and what she actually _needs_ to know.

 

Some idea of exactly how volatile her crew all are, for example, would have been incredibly helpful.

 

She knows that Veda in its infinite wisdom ran its own version of a psych evaluation on them, because Sumeragi, herself, has the clearance to access the findings of her own evaluation, but it did not divulge to her any insight beyond what parts of the Meisters’ personalities it found helpful in carrying out their prime directive. It didn’t provide any warning that, say, Allelujah would do incredibly poorly during their lifeboat evacuation drill — to the point of a full blown panic attack that took him out of commission for the rest of the day as he decompressed in the padded room, or that he would violently lash out during his first medical examination with Dr. Moreno for a still unclear reason, destroying a few thousand euros worth of equipment and smashing the three vials of his own blood that had been drawn for analysis so that the entire sick bay looked like a crime scene with red droplets and glass shards suspended in weightlessness catching the lights overhead and both men huddled on opposite sides of the room sporting a shared expression between perplexion and shock. It would have been helpful for Veda to also raise the alarm that Setsuna startled easily when approached from behind without being alerted, that he could not stand any sort of physical contact beyond gloved hand-on-gloved hand, or that a news program that discussed child exploitation would set him off to such a degree that he would destroy a speaker through which the rest of the crew present for the incident had been broadcasting said report. The bridge crew had watched helplessly as he’d clutched it in his hands, raised it above his head, and slammed it down against the floor panels, smashing it three times until it splintered into a dozen plastic shards and a tangle of colorful wires. Veda hadn’t prepared her for Tieria’s general standoffishness or the level of confrontation and blatant disdain he was ready to display against his own teammates on a daily basis — a feature which further seemed to rile Lockon and Allelujah particularly.

 

Lockon himself seems okay, at least. Except when his family is mentioned. It’s happened only two or three times, but each time, the color noticeably drained from his face and the smile that seemed ever present suddenly became tight and fake as it he’d rehearsed it incorrectly so many times that he couldn’t unlearn the mistakes now.

 

Sumeragi has been tugged through the sleepy corridor that leads from her bunk near the control room to the Meisters’ bunks adjacent to the hangar.

 

The setup of the Ptolemaios is intended to expedite an emergency scramble, keeping everyone in close proximity to where they need to be to fulfill their duties; another Veda-ordered feature. It makes sense, Sumeragi thinks, but she laments that she’s so far from the others, so unable to check in on them with any sense of immediacy. The conveyor makes travel in weightlessness simpler and less clumsy, but it’s slow. A false alarm had gone off once on the second night of deployment as she’d been asleep; Ian and Lichty had been tinkering with some defense system parts and they’d crossed the wrong wires. There was never any threat of danger, but Sumeragi, having just been jettisoned from deep sleep, could not possibly have known that. She’d grabbed her flight suit and helmet and flung herself through the air into the hallway, crashing into one wall before ricocheting into the opposite. Once her feet finally found purchase on something solid, she’d kicked off hard like a competitive swimmer from the wall of a pool, sending her body hurtling down the gravityless, frictionless hallway and harshly into a door frame. Ian’s voice poured in from the intercom just moments later explaining the problem, but the reassurance came seconds too late and Sumeragi was forced to shake the stars of her collision from her vision.

 

Tieria’s room is first, the furthest from the hangar. A smooth metal door to her left, there is no distinguishing feature from any of the other bunks to signify that this room is Tieria’s, but Sumeragi has it memorized: when approaching from her bunk toward the hangar, Tieria’s is first on the left, Lockon and Allelujah are across from one another, and Setsuna’s is beside Allelujah’s, closest to the hangar. She has it memorized because she’s made it a priority to know her men. A good knowledge of her men, she thinks, will help her make the right calls. Will help her to keep them alive. Sumeragi isn’t sure if there’s much to be gained from knowing which bunk they chose to be theirs, but she memorizes it, anyway.

 

Like herself and most others on their ship, Tieria sleeps with his door closed. There’s no way of knowing from the outside whether the door is also locked, but Sumeragi suspects this is the case and doesn’t dare attempt to find out by attempting to open the door. Privacy is a valuable commodity aboard the Ptolemaios, as much as oxygen and water and warmth. Close quarters conditions for extended periods are maddening and can quickly lead to squabbles. Sumeragi won’t risk the peace that comes with night when their doors are closed.

 

Instead, she presses her ear against it. Panic doesn’t immediately set in when she hears nothing. After all, the walls and doors of the Ptolemaios are thick and metal-plated. Their ship is designed to be airtight and to withstand a hull breach. It’s even submersible, or so she’s been told, but she tries to put that out of her mind because the idea of dropping their ship that’s primarily designed to withstand no gravity suddenly under multiple atmospheres of pressure makes her squirm. But hearing nothing from Tieria’s room doesn’t make her squirm. It’s normal, she reminds herself.

 

Sumeragi won’t open one of her crew’s doors, but when listening through the walls proves ineffective, she decides she’s not above toggling on the video feed from the security cameras mounted in their rooms. Veda insisted all rooms be outfitted with security cameras. Sumeragi has access to all of them.

 

She thought that something like this — something like spying on her crew, invading their privacy so brazenly — would have come with difficulty. In a way, she wishes she could feel something about it. Maybe remorse or shame or disgust with herself. But she doesn’t feel any of those things.

 

It’s a silent maneuver. Sumeragi uses a wall-mounted touchscreen near the hangar hatch to do the deed, her command-level clearance allowing her access unabated (or at least relatively so in their new and enigmatic world where Veda gatekeeps every bit of data that even hypothetically passes through their minds). The screen flickers on immediately, but the feed at first is solid black. It’s now one fifty four Greenwich Mean Time, and they are currently positioned three quarters of the way between Lagrange Two and Lagrange Three in the infinite black chasm of space, so the darkness is to be expected. Within seconds, the sensor detects the lack of light and automatically switches over to night vision mode. A greyscale replica of the interior of Tieria’s room comes into view.

 

What Sumeragi feels is not remorse or shame or disgust, but relief.

 

Once again, there is no personalization to be noted here. At least in Sumeragi’s bunk, she’s installed a mini fridge and she has a few photos taped to her walls — all permissible custom features. Tieria’s room is stock standard, barren of any traces of himself. It’s sterile.

 

Tieria is asleep on his back, covered up to his waist in his sleeping bag and cinched in under a lap belt to keep him from drifting, and she knows he’s asleep because she can make out the faint rise and fall of his chest as he breathes. His arms are crossed over his chest in his sleep as they tend to be in his waking hours as if the universe itself has constantly done him some great disservice, except now they hover a few centimeters above him. She notes that it looks like he’s wearing his flight suit, gloves and all, and wonders if he’s got some inside information about an impending emergency drill.

 

There’s something comforting about the slow, measured movements of his sleeping breaths. It’s hypnotic, she decides. Each respiration comes perfectly measured. He breathes in, chest rising — she catches herself mimicking the action. He exhales. Sumeragi exhales.

 

She can tell that he’s okay almost immediately, but nonetheless, she watches him for several minutes through the feed, breathing with him until she’s satisfied that nothing will change no matter how long she spies.

 

And then she switches the feed to the next room.

 

Lockon shares a wall with Tieria, and his camera feed comes up next on the panel. Sumeragi catches herself smiling a smile that no one will see here in the quiet hallway; Lockon sleeps curled on his side, mouth agape ever so slightly, a few locks of hair floating around him as if he’s brushed his hand through them in his sleep and sent them flying. He looks far more peaceful than Tieria, as if he’s resting and not simply reclined with his eyes screwed shut in perpetual annoyance. So much so, in fact, that Sumeragi imagines that it must have been difficult for Veda to understand when it first began studying humanity that these two seemingly different actions were, in fact, fulfilling the same biological need.

 

He looks younger now, too. She doesn’t doubt her initial estimates that he’s close to her age, but asleep, she can see that his jaw has relaxed from a clenched state she didn’t notice before. His brow has unfurrowed, making her see that it was, in fact, furrowed. What has him so worried? Lockon is so young, and yet he carries a sadness with him that Sumeragi recognizes as a likeness of her own burden. She knows the slumped look of a person crushed under the weight of regret and mourning. Who has he lost?

 

She urges those thoughts away, feeling almost guilty to be thinking such things when Lockon finally looks at peace. 

 

Unlike Tieria, what parts of Lockon she can see — mostly his chest and arms — are not wrapped in flight suit, and so Sumeragi begins to doubt her previous inklings that there may be an emergency drill planned for that night; Tieria may not be the type to pal around with his comrades, but he is the sort to keep his fellow Meisters on task with things like preparing for a mock scramble. Where Tieria was sleeping begrudgingly out of necessity, Lockon is truly resting.

 

Lockon’s room, too, looks cozier. It is tidy and minimalistic for practicality, but there are a few personal mementos posted around the space — she notes, in particular, that a paper target riddled with tight clusters of perfectly circular holes right at the bullseye has been taped to the door of one of his overhead storage bins, and a small potted plant of some sort has been secured to his desk. Clovers, maybe, but it’s hard to tell with the night vision setting. There’s nothing here that would give away information they didn’t already know, of course, but these artifacts are just personal enough that she will immediately associate them with Lockon when she thinks about them from now on.

 

She watches Lockon until he moves in his sleep, and then, feeling as if she’s somehow disturbed him and made him aware of her presence, she quickly toggles the camera to Allelujah’s room.

 

Jet lag, for their crew, is the great equalizer. Although Veda gives only general information about its members’ origins beyond the specific coordinates it provides for the purposes of an in-person recruitment mission (and even this is discreet and not to be shared with anyone else but those who receive it), innately human tells have provided Sumeragi with additional insight. A few of the crew were able to force an adjustment to their eating habits and sleeping patterns almost immediately upon deployment, but only a very minimal few.

 

And so Sumeragi finds it strange, knowing that Allelujah was picked up several time zones east of GMT somewhere in the Human Reform League, that the young man is not asleep. He seems routinely exhausted around 1900 almost every evening, musters his energy to get through whatever training they’ve been working on that day, reports in for debriefing, and half-collapses into his bunk after they’ve eaten. That much is expected; where Sumeragi herself only had to adjust her schedule by one hour forward, Allelujah continues to struggle to adjust backwards seven or eight or nine hours. She had always assumed that when he went to his room it was to sleep, but now she doesn’t know what to think.

 

He’s half knelt, half stretched out at his desk and she can see the glow of a screen; he’s accessed Veda. The brightness of the glow from Allelujah’s screen makes it challenging for Sumeragi’s to capture his room in night vision, and it suddenly snaps into true color display, showing her the near black of his room with edges and angles lit by the cyan glow from his terminal. Even so, Sumeragi can’t tell what it is that he’s accessed. She can see text, but it’s too small for her to read.

 

Allelujah is talking to himself. The sharp line of his jaw is clearly moving. His voice is being picked up, too, but just barely, and not well enough for Sumeragi to make out anything he’s saying. She’s not sure, in fact, that he’s speaking a language she recognizes.

 

What she is sure of is that he’s talking to himself. Speaking with himself. She sees him say something, pause for only half a second, and then say something else. It’s as if there should be someone else in the room with him, carrying their share of the conversation, but he’s playing both roles. What’s he doing? What’s he saying?

 

The guilt sets in when she realizes that her perverse curiosity has begun taking over her practical sense of duty to her crew. She’s no longer checking in on him. From the moment she saw him awake, she knew he was fine. This is no longer a wellness check. She’s spying.

 

Clearly Allelujah is unharmed, so she toggles the camera once more.

 

Two days ago, Sumeragi had flung herself into a panic when she’d made the terrifying discovery that Setsuna had gone missing in the night. She’d pulled three engineers and two medical staff from their stations and given them immediate orders to search the ship from bow to stern until they found him. The sensation of her veins swelling with first boiling and then with icy blood as her heart lurched in her chest still stalked around her recent memories like the metallic aftertaste of vitamins.

 

Crew are not ordered to remain in their rooms during blackout hours. All crew are advised to, out of courtesy, remain quiet between 2200 and 0600, but there are no mandates on the matter. Nothing forcing them from wandering through the ship at night to, say, visit the viewing deck or to spy on their fellow Celestial Being members. It was amenable to Veda.

 

But it hadn’t been fine to Sumeragi that Setsuna was not where he should be that night. Visions of a secretive infiltrator aboard the Ptolemaios coming to dispose of Setsuna in the night had expanded in her mind like foam insulator until every nook and cranny and neuron was filled with a singular panic: Setsuna’s gone. She couldn’t protect him.

 

When it had turned out that Setsuna had simply been in the hangar with his Gundam, Sumeragi had unleashed a catharsis-cum-tirade upon him. Past the cursing and the panicked yelling, her rant had essentially boiled down to, “Why were you in the hangar?” Leesa Kujo had never had siblings, and so Sumeragi Lee Noriega did not know how to communicate with any persons significantly younger than her without sounding like she was scolding a toddler, but if Setsuna had been offended by her infantilizing of him, he didn’t make it known.

 

He’d answered simply, “I go every night.”

 

“Why?!” she’d demanded.

 

“I just want to.” His voice had been calm, not at all defensive. He’d given her a simple answer for a simple question. Sumeragi had ached to be mad, but Setsuna is a child. Maybe fifteen. He could have been her little brother in a different life.

 

“Alright,” she’d conceded. “Were you in your Gundam?”

 

“Yes.” Another curt response. Not rude, just precise. Veda had told her Setsuna would be like this.

 

“Because...?”

 

“Because I want to. Because I need to. The hangar is not off-limits after hours to crew.” That had, essentially, been the end of the conversation.

 

Tonight, when Sumeragi doesn’t find Setsuna in his room, she does not succumb to panic. Instead, she enters a quick command to have the camera show her the inside of the hangar. Setsuna is there, reclined back at an angle which, she can tell, allows him to take in the full awe of the hulking metal creature that looms over him. He looks tiny in the cavernous room. Tiny and susceptible. Unprotected.

 

But he’s okay. He’s alive.

 

Sumeragi desperately wants to know why Setsuna visits his Gundam every night. Of all the crew, he seems the most dedicated to the mission. The other three pilots have their own reasons that she can’t quite put into words, but for which she can get a general taste. But for Setsuna, Celestial Being is something more. Gundams are something more. She craves understanding that she is beginning to accept that she will never receive.

 

She yawns. It’s two thirty two Greenwich Mean Time.

 

It’s a conversation best left until morning, until after they’ve slept. Or at least, until after Sumeragi has slept. She wants to ask Veda if Setsuna ever sleeps, because she's almost certain she's never seen it, but it occurs to her that it’s such a silly question that it doesn’t bear asking. Of course he sleeps; he’s human.

 

And even if she did ask, Veda probably wouldn’t give her a response, anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> Thinking about Den Mother Sumeragi again. I actually wrote this back in November 2018 and promptly forgot about it. Oops. 
> 
> I like to imagine that she finds it calming to know that her boys are safe and sound, even under the care of her orders (which, of course, she can't trust at this point). Not sure they'd find it as charming to know they're being surveilled, although I feel like they probably also expect it given their line of work. 
> 
> I can also definitely imagine her yelling at a Veda terminal to give her the --ing reports right the -- now, switching between whatever the lingua franca is aboard the Ptolemaios (English? Japanese? German? Does anyone really know? Part of me wants it to be German because "Schenberg" and "Meisters" but that also doesn't make sense haha) and Spanish to allow for greater expletive use. To no avail, of course.


End file.
